Archives for December 2014

The killing and savagery rampant in the world are mirrored in the hearts of people who inhabit it. In A Most Violent Year, written and directed by J. D. Chandor, the ethics and values of Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) are sorely tested in 1981, one of the more statistically turbulent times in New York City. […]

Physical aging is often a blatant visual affront, but the brain’s wearing way can be much more subtle. In Still Alice, co-written and co-directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, linguistics professor Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) experiences the first clue to her mental degeneration when she can’t put her finger on a specific word while […]

White reflects heat. It’s the perfect corporate foil when tempers escalate and being thrown into a tsunami of selling and networking is akin to being in a sauna. On the other hand, white also reflects sunlight, throwing solar beauty right back into the other guy’s face. Maybe that’s why the white sleeveless blouse, which somehow […]

Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes), from Argentine director Damian Szifron, is a film of six stories, each one a tale about people getting even. Vengefulness and retaliatory measures, as responses to offensive acts, have been around since the beginning of time. And, if animals retaliated in bestial ways when their kill was poached, Szifron makes it […]

Saturnine self-mastery is never easy. The challenge becomes even more formidable when one’s values and integrity are tied up with the political well being of a people. In Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay, the Rev. Martin Luther King finds himself in exactly this position as he straddles being true to his core beliefs while creating […]

At the heart of soldiering is the Mars archetype, involving action, weapons and a fair amount of aggression to ensure the job gets done. As seen in American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s biopic of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL with the highest sniper-kill numbers in U.S. military history, Kyle clearly took his work in the field home […]

When beset by trauma, disappointment and hurt, people often find their way to a dark place to sort things out. The Underworld of the psyche is where knowledge can be accessed with hard, committed work. It’s an inner journey that’s well reflected in Into the Woods, a grown-up complex take on fairy tales based on […]

A Russian modern-day epic, Leviathan begins and ends with an images of nature at its most pristine. Gradually the geography becomes more contaminated until we rest on a wreck of a house that’s the fragile link between a one-time unspoiled ancestral heritage of land and its exploitation. The inciting incident that drives Leviathan, written and […]

The work world is notoriously time-obsessed. One toils a certain number of days and hours, gets a certain amount of time as vacation and, depending on the employer, may be required to punch a time card to prove accountability. How fitting then, that in Two Days, One Night, a woman has only a limited period […]

If eyes are the windows to the soul, you can’t get a better view of the psyche than by peering through the gigantic orbs painted on despondent-looking waifs’ faces by Margaret Keane half a century ago. Big Eyes, a movie about Keane’s creations which were both jarring and evocative, explores these sad wide-eyed wonders as […]

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